There’s No Time to Rest Until the Last Zombie in Africa Is Toast

Resident Evil 5: In the latest in this
game series, a zombie virus
strikes a locality in Africa.Credit
Capcom

Let’s get this out of the way: Resident Evil 5 is not a racist game.

For at least a year some black journalists have been wringing their hands about whether the game, the latest in the seminal survival-horror series, inflames racist stereotypes because it is set in Africa. The answer is no.

The series, which began in 1996, is about a virulent bioweapon that turns people into zombies and other gross, pustulant monstrosities. In what has already become perhaps the most hackneyed theme in gaming, the player’s job is to save humanity from (yet another) zombie apocalypse. Other games in the franchise have been set elsewhere, like the United States, Spain and South America. In the new installment, released Friday for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, the action shifts to Africa, where the local population in the fictional region of Kijuju has fallen victim to the Las Plagas virus.

So Resident Evil 5 exposes the perhaps uncomfortable truth that blacks and Arabs can become zombies too, just like anyone else. Blacks and Arabs do not have a secret anti-zombie gene. And just like all the thousands of white, Asian and Hispanic zombies that have been dispatched in innumerable other games before them, the African zombies must also be destroyed, or at least neutralized.

This supposed controversy is why no one should ever try to come to a serious judgment about a game — which by its nature is interactive — based on a noninteractive snippet like a trailer.

There is no question that Resident Evil 5 is mostly about a white guy and his local café-au-lait hottie running around killing a bunch of deranged Africans (as opposed to deranged white people). But this is not a movie. When you are in control of the action the racial or ethnic appearance of your enemies simply stops mattering. The basic mechanics of moving, shooting, using cover, solving puzzles, employing weapons properly and understanding the overall environment are universal, no matter whether the enemies are aliens or Nazis or zombies or gangsters or any of the other categories we use to denote “acceptable to kill.”

Resident Evil 5 is certainly violent, but it does not feel especially gratuitous in its depiction of violence against African zombies. The point of the story is that the indigenous people have become the innocent victims of evil white people.

Photo

A shapely sidekick, right, accompanies the hero on his mission.Credit
Capcom

All that said, Resident Evil 5 could not possibly have been made in the United States. Racial sensitivities and prevailing political correctness would have had American game executives squirming in their Aeron chairs the minute they read a budget proposal for a game featuring African zombies.

Not so in Japan, apparently. The Japanese development team at Capcom, which developed Resident Evil, professed surprise at the racism concerns when black game writers in the United States started criticizing the game based on preview videos more than a year ago. To help the Japanese team understand, perhaps they should consider what the response in Asia would be to a Japanese game in which the player slaughters zombified Chinese villagers.

So we all have our cultural blind spots and predilections about whom it is acceptable to kill, even when they are fictional, digital zombies.

Perhaps the more interesting and broader point is that Resident Evil 5 helps demonstrate, yet again, how video games are Japan’s most successful and important cultural export. Japanese music, films, comic books, television shows, theater and fiction all have their niche fans around the world, but none have had the global reach and relevance of the country’s video games over the last 30 years. The realism and dynamic subtlety of the animation in games like Resident Evil 5 and Metal Gear Solid 4 are far beyond anything produced by an American or European studio.

Now what about Resident Evil 5 as a game? It is very good but falls short of excellence because of its interminable confusion about just what sort of game it wants to be. See, there is a difference between horror-terror and all-out action. The Resident Evil series basically invented the survival horror genre, which means sneaking around as you wonder just when the next ravenous flesh-eater is going to pop out at you. But Resident Evil 5 feels at times as if it’s trying to be Gears of War, where you are blasting away all the time.

That’s why it’s maddening that Resident Evil 5 refuses to commit itself to basic action conventions like the intuitive concept that you can move and shoot at the same time, which should seem obvious. Instead the game sticks to its roots by immobilizing the player whenever you pull your gun out. It comes off like a contrivance, nothing more.

Nonetheless the Resident Evil 5 is mostly enjoyable. The single-player campaign should take most gamers 8 to 12 hours, depending on skill and difficulty level. (After some technical problems I played through the Playstation 3 version.) It is violent and gorgeous and gory all at the same time. It just isn’t racist.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: There’s No Time to Rest Until the Last Zombie in Africa Is Toast. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe